Hollywood Is
All About Genre: Was Waking Life, a Study in Dreams, Atypical?
Virginia Milhouse is an
associate and Fulbright professor at the University of Oklahoma.
She teaches courses in international, intercultural, interpersonal
and nonverbal communication and spiritual and personal growth. She
has authored/co-authored a number of books, scholarly and other
journal articles.
Abstract
Most people who are familiar with
the movie, Waking Life, would agree that it is full of
philosophical and intriguing questions: What are dreams? Why do we
dream? Are we dreaming all the time? How do we know when we are or
are not dreaming? What is consciousness? What is destiny?
As
such Waking Life has presented some movie critics with a
formidable challenge. Unable to situate this movie within the
genres of traditional Hollywood films – style, tone, character
types, themes and structure – these critics have resorted to
clichés and stereotypical reviews. For some it was sheer agony, a
penance to sit through or like being in a university philosophy
101 classroom (Anthony, 2001). Others expressed doubt in Waking
Life’s voracity or ability to rise to the level of those Hollywood
films which are heralded as the cutting edge of visual innovation
(Strickler, 2001). In other words, Hollywood films are all about
genre or typical disaster, adventure, comedy, crime, detective
stories, courtroom dramas, epics or myths, fantasy, horror, love
or romance films, science fiction and social drama. Movies which
do not fit this framework or compose these ingredients (e.g.
styles, tones, character types, themes and structure), may be
prejudiced by movie critics who lack direct knowledge about or
experience with them. Research shows that critics who do not know
the genre of a movie cannot understand its story form (Pearson,
2002).
Waking Life – a movie about dreams and described by some as a
spiritually rich and religiously inspired movie (Brussat, 2001) –
did not fit these traditional film genres. Waking Life presents an
uncanny depiction of the peculiar style, structure, themes and
characters experienced in lucid dreams. It is, therefore, the
contention of this paper that the critics who rated Waking Life a
“rotten tomato” or gave it a score of 2 or lower were not familiar
with the genres of lucid, religious or spiritual dreams. Movie
critics with direct knowledge of or experience with the genre of
this type of dream know that the dreamer often goes on a voyage of
discovery and finds out things about the future he or she could
not have learned otherwise. So it is with the protagonist or
“grand dreamer” in the movie, Waking Life who sifts through an
assortment of enlightening topics and ideas which can be
conceptualized as five interrelated and distinct religious and
spiritual themes: existentialism and free will, individuation,
reality, artistic creativity and dreams and the collective
unconscious. Despite this, Waking Life has been cast as a
hodge-podge of movie types straddling several traditional film
genres: fantasy, science fiction, comedy, action, drama or
adventure. When atypical movies (e.g. Waking Life) are situated
among these typical Hollywood genres, they are almost always
judged using clichés and/or commonplace expressions. Therefore,
this session will present the results of a content analysis of 130
(including 127 reviews by major movie critics and 3 reviews by the
analyst) movie reviews of the movie Waking Life to determine: (1)
the true genre of Waking Life, (2) if the critics understood its
genre, (3) if some critics demonstrated a greater understanding or
knowledge of it than others, and (4) why? The content analysis
will use an adapted version of Horton’s Inventorial Record Form,
Hal-Van De Castle Scales and SPSS Text Analysis Computer Software
Program.
